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February 01, 2013

I hold my breath when I lay my sleeping
baby down in the cradle. Please, please let him stay asleep.

I hold my breath when my husband plays
with the baby, swinging him up in the air. He is careful and they
both laugh, but still.

I hold my breath at every routine
health checkup until the doctor finishes examining my son and smiles
his approval at me.

I hold my breath when he is asleep and
I am in another room and think I hear him cry. Sometimes I'm right,
and sometimes I'm just imagining it, but the only way to find out is
to hold my breath and listen.

And sometimes I do that thing that
parents do, when we stand over our sleeping children and hold our
breath, and listen to them breathe.

I remember, as a teenager, watching a
television show with my mother. It was called "Who Lives In A
House Like This?" and the show's host would poke around a
celebrity's home and then invite a panel to guess who the celebrity
was. You could usually get quite a lot of information about the
house's inhabitants from the interior, including their ages.

In our flat, it is abundantly clear
that one of the people who lives here is a baby.

The baby furniture is a dead giveaway
of course - the garish play gym in the corner of the living room, the
playpen in the dining room, the heirloom cradle in the bedroom that
was designed and built by my father. But there's more to it than that
- it's as though a layer of small items has been laid over our house,
a veritable patina of babyness.

There are clean bottles lined up by the
kettle, dirty ones clustered by the sink. If you were to open the
microwave, you would find the sterilizer that has taken up
semi-permanent residence within.

The clothes horse in the boxroom is
strewn with white babygros, blue muslin squares, pastel flannel
blankets. Our own clothes are relegated to drip-drying on hangers
because there just isn't room for them any more. I congratulate
myself on my decision to forgo the environmentally-friendly but
washing-intensive cloth nappies.

Our bedroom chest of drawers is piled
with clothes that are too big for the baby yet, but I haven't found a
place to store them. A box nearby is full of tiny clothes that he has
already outgrown, and I will vacuum-pack them and store them for
future siblings or cousins. Some day.

My husband's side of the bed is
littered with very small clothes that smell of sunshine, dumped there
this morning when I needed the clothesbasket for a load of towels. At
the rate this child goes through clothes, sometimes there doesn't
seem to be much point in putting them back in the drawers...

Right now the bathroom looks like a
bomb exploded in it - the aftermath of the nightly bath. The plastic
bathtub is lying on the floor instead of on top of the
washing-machine where it belongs, because after serving as a
bath-stand, the washine-machine must then do double duty as a
changing table, since I am loath to take my naked baby out of the
nice warm bathroom and into the cold dining-room where the official
changing table resides.

There are dirty baby clothes on the
floor where I dropped them next to the used nappy, and both of the
other available surfaces contain the clean clothes that I changed my
mind about putting on him. The baby soap bottle is on the shelf over
the sink, and the bath thermometer in the form of a purple octopus is
sitting on the toilet cistern, although there is a place for both of
them in the box of baby bath stuff - also currently on the floor.
There is a small, wet, green towel on the box. One corner of it has
been sewn into a hood, decorated to look like a monster's head. There
are few things cuter than a freshly-bathed baby boy wearing a green
monster hood.

The rest of the bathroom floor is taken up by a baby
bouncer, that boon of parents and a great help when one is attempting
to bathe and change a baby single-handedly. As with so many other
daily tasks, I managed to accomplish bathtime, but at the end of it I
had an armful of baby demanding that I do something else other than
tidy up. I will sort this all out first thing tomorrow, if for no
other reason than it is currently impossible to get to the shower.

Our study is in the process of being
transformed into the baby's room - a project we have deferred since
he will be sleeping in the cradle in our room for a few more months.
Even so, once again it is clear that a baby is in residence. The
dresser boasts a row of baby books, the genesis of a nursery library,
while inside it are boxes of shoes and toys, waiting for him to be
old enough for them. Our computer and desk are still in there, beside
the dresser. The back of the desk holds a row of books on
ethnography, but the rest of the desk features a tube of teething
gel, a cloth baby book, and a brightly-coloured teether toy, too new
to show any signs of wear from being enthusiastically gummed all day.

The desk also features two baby items
that are often to be found on my bedside table, on the living room
coffee table, and indeed on any flat surface in our home - a bowl of
water (for cooling down bottles) and large muslin square (used for
wiping up spit-up and dribble).

While I was in the process of mentally
formulating this post, it occurred to me that there remained one
place in our flat that did not feature any babyness - the two
cupboards by the front door that we use to dump junkmail and bills
and bags and miscellaneous flotsam on.

But wait, I was wrong.

Sure enough, on one of the cupboards
there sits a tin of baby formula, a gift from Santa Claus, delivered
to my parents' house by that jolly old soul but not yet placed on the
shelf of the pantry where I keep the unopened formula, nappies and
baby wipes.

We hope that siblings will follow in
the coming years, which I imagine will lead to even more children's
stuff. I wonder how many times I will have to bite back a shout when
I tread, barefoot at midnight, on a stray piece of lego, or how many
times I will fish crayons from underneath various items of furniture.
It seems that a tidying-up policy, properly enforced, will be vital.

I surprisingly enjoy the feeling that
the baby has occupied, in some way, every room of the house. It is,
after all, a reflection of how our daily lives are now dominated by
his needs. Later I will probably feel the need to claw back some part
of the flat for myself, perhaps turn the master bedroom into a
child-free sanctuary once the baby is installed in his own bedroom,
but for now I am happy to see that we have assimilated this new
member of our family.